Electronic equipment using semiconductor devices are essential for many modern applications. With the advancement of electronic technology, electronic equipment is becoming increasingly smaller in size and complicated in structure and functionality. Wafer level packaging (WLP) technology has been gaining popularity and is widely applied. This technology provides a wafer level manufacturing of semiconductor devices with high functions and complicated structures while the size of the semiconductor devices is minimized.
The WLP technology is widely adopted for assembling and combining a number of semiconductor components to become a semiconductor device so as to minimize the final size of the semiconductor device as well as the electronic equipment. During assembly operations, the semiconductor device is sawed and singulated from a wafer by a mechanical or laser blade. The semiconductor device is individualized for subsequent assembly operations. However, the semiconductor device includes many semiconductor components with complicated structures. The singulation operations involve many complicated manufacturing processes and as such, the semiconductor device is easily damaged during the singulation operations.
The sawing operations on the wafer is complicated because it involves numerous operations, and such operations that are applied on the small semiconductor device include many different kinds of materials with different properties. The differences between materials would increase the complexity of manufacturing the semiconductor devices and may also increase yield loss. This could result in poor bondability between components, and cracking or delamination of the components.